Editor:- June 12, 2018 - GridGain Systems
today
announced
the beta release and free trials of GridGain
Cloud - an in-memory cache-as-a-service that allows users to rapidly deploy
a distributed in-memory cache and access it using ANSI-99 SQL, key-value or REST
APIs. The result is in-memory computing performance in the cloud, which can be
massively scaled out and can be deployed in minutes for caching applications.
why we need cloud chips

Editor's comments:- the needs of the cloud, coupled
with growing understanding between the tradeoffs between
processors,
memory,
controller
dynamics, software
and energy consumption since the widespread deployment of solid state storage
have been the inspiration for rethinking all the classical elements of computer
architecture. Some of that thinking has been rooted in the memory space but
just as significant has been a rethinking of what processors should aim to do.

Tachyum announced external funding for its Cloud Chip
last month. And
as with previous disruptive technologies - part of the warm up process for the
market - is to educate more people about how things work now so they can better
appreciate what the new technologies offer.ioFABRIC awarded patent for latency aware software

Editor:-
February 27, 2018 - ioFABRIC
today
announced
it has been awarded a patent for an innovation in its Vicinity policy engine for
creating and managing data volumes based on latency requirements.

The patent protects a method for maintaining fast response times by
auto-migrating data when hardware resources are added or decommissioned, when
performance degrades due to overconsumption, or application use requirements
change. Vicinity can apply this policy even when a volume is spread over
multiple nodes and storage devices

Ron Bianchini,
President and CEO - Avere Systems said - "When we started Avere Systems
in 2008, our founding ideology was to use fast, flash-based storage in the most
efficient, effective manner possible in the datacenter. Along the way, our team
of file systems experts created a technology that not only optimized critical
on-premises storage resources but also enabled enterprises to move
mission-critical, high performance application workloads to the cloud."...read
more from Ron Bianchini

Editor's comments:- There was a lot of
deep thinking in Avere. I wish them luck in the reset and recompile
chaos-sphere.

Editor's comments:- The notable thing for me in this announcement
was that WekaIO uses a performance benchmark compared against an
IBM FlashSystem 900 (the
decendant of the RamSan
world's fastest storage systems from
TMS.)

That's
an ambitious positioning statement and offers users a glimpse into the kind of
performance they can get by using flash assisted cloud services. Like other
modern SSD fabric software software - "WekaIO eliminates bottlenecks and
storage silos by aggregating local SSDs inside the servers into one logical
pool, which is then presented as a single namespace to the host applications."Walmart generates 2.5PB of analyzable data every hour

Editor:-
April 3, 2017 - Walmart's Data Café
is a private cloud which supports business decision makers in its 20,000
stores who can access over 200 streams of internal and external data, including
40 petabytes of recent transactional data, which can be modelled, manipulated
and visualized.

Editor:-
March 7, 2017 - "If your business leverages AWS, and you had an outage or
degraded operation during the massive AWS outage last week, you can only blame
yourself" - says Erez
Ofer, Partner at 83North in his new blog -
No Excuses.
Among other things Erez Ofer says - "What is happening now after each cloud
outage is a lot of learning by businesses on how to create systems that don't go
down." ...read
the article

Editor:- January 24,
2017 - Throughout the
history of
the data storage market we've always expected the capacity of enterprise user
memory systems to be much smaller than the capacity of all the other attached
storage in the same data processing environment.

Like many of you - I've been thinking a lot about the
evolution of memory technologies and data architectures in the past year. I
wasn't sure when would be the best time to share my thoughts about this one.
But the timing seems right now. ...read the
articleNimbus awarded patent for non blocking backplane technology

Editor:- November 3, 2016 - Elastifile today
announced
it has been granted a US patent (No. 9,465,558) for a method of
flash-native, collaborative data storage when running on multiple interconnected
nodes.

Elastifile's technology (which is integrated in software
solutions) is aimed at the hybrid cloud market.

The patented
technology enables efficient, distributed storage across full-mesh clustered
architectures in which all nodes interact with one another across multiple sites
and clouds, in complex or constantly varying network conditions, and/or at a
scale that may encompass thousands of diverse configurations.

"One
of the greatest challenges for private and hybrid cloud data services has been
ensuring consistent performance for distributed data writing, especially due to
noisy and mixed environments," said Ezra Hoch, chief
architect at Elastifile. "Our patented approach adaptively and efficiently
manages how and where data is written, mitigating the constantly changing
conditionsat cloud scale."
Maxta offers free 24TB version of its SDS software

Editor:- September 29, 2016 - Maxta today
announced
the general availability of a free download of its
MxSP SDS software for qualified
organizations in the U.S., Canada and select European countries.

Approved
registrants will receive a perpetual, transferable license to a fully-featured
version of the software free of charge, enabling them to configure and deploy
a three-node HCI cluster with a maximum storage capacity of 24TB.

lowering cloud wattage with low DWPD SATA SSDs

Editor:-
August 4, 2016 - Although it's the faster SSD products (like
PCIe SSDs and
memory channel
SSDs) which capture the attention of readers - because they show what is
possible (and after a long enough interval we see pioneering enterprise speeds
becoming commonplace at lower
prices as we're now
seeing with M.2 SSDs)
nevertheless - when it comes to where most of the SSD slots are - the workhorse
of the SSD market - in arrays, webscale and cloud - is still the simple
2.5"
SATA SSD.

Well, maybe not that simple - because since about
2012 we
started to see subtle power optimized and mostly read oriented (low
DWPD) SATA SSD product
lines being introduced specifically for use in dense populations in the
cloud.

It's a
big market for SSD
vendors and SATA SSDs
are a low risk choice for users because there are so many competing companies
and products that ensure continuous improvements in value and quality.

A
new addition to this crowded market is the -
Nytro
XF1230 (pdf) - a 1.9TB capacity SSD which consumes less than 5W, is
rated at 0.67 DWPD -
which Seagateannounced
will ship to channel partners next month. Weka.IO has raised over $32 million for its SDS cloud cookbook

Editor:-
June 8, 2016 - another new name unstealthing in the software defined storage
market is Weka.IO, founded in 2014,
which has
announced
the closing of Series B funding bringing its total capital raised to over $32
million.

Editor's comments:- In various
slideshares by Weka.IO
cofounder and CTO - Liran
Zvibel - you can see how they're progressing with their big idea of
enabling clouds and enterprises to have a single software based storage
solution with good performance, efficiency and scalability.

There are
interesting comments here about the latency impacts of garbage collection
within the D software development environment.

Zvibel says an
infrequent (few times an hour) latency of 10mS for GC can become an infinite
wait if the kernel is stressed on memory.

Liran's slideshare
(from 2014) -
the
future of the data center - includes this comment:- "IBM, Oracle,
Microsoft, SAP, Dell and the like lost their ability to shape the future of
data centers."Pure's CEO says his legacy systems competitors are 2-3 years
behind in flash/cloud centric software

Editor:- May 26, 2016 -
Pure Storage
reported that revenue for its recent quarter was approx $140 million, up 89%
from the year ago period.

In his
blog
which recaps business highlights CEO - Scott Dietzen - comments
on the nature of the competition he sees from legacy storage companies.

He
says - "In our view, refurbished mechanical disk-era designs from the last
century cannot fulfill the needs of the modern data center: solid-state flash
memory and cloud demand a holistic rethink. Yet the majority of FlashArray's and
all of FlashBlade's competition comes from pre-cloud disk-centric retrofits..."
...read
the articleAvere ranked #1 in Google's cloud partner search list

Editor:-
March 16 , 2016 - How well does Avere Systems (and
its virtual edge filer) work as a
gateway to
Google's cloud services?
Apparently very well - as Avere today
announced
it had been named "Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner of the Year"
for 2015. Plexistor releases its Software Defined Memory

Editor:-
January 26, 2016 - Plexistor
today announced the availability of its Software Defined Memory (SDM)
architecture for both on-premise and cloud-based deployment on EC2 for AWS.

Plexistor has a
presentation
(ppt) which outlines the launch product environment and gives indicative
benchmarks. Cache latency is key to side-channel attack technique which can
breach cloud server security walls

Editor:- October 29, 2015 -
Cache jitter and latencies are more than simply
performance
quality issues - they can be the root of
security
vulnerabilities too.

The research team used a combination of
techniques to first create a virtual machine on the same Amazon cloud server as
a target machine (a technique known as co-location). They then used the
co-located machine to spy on the target. By observing how it accessed
information in memory, they could determine when it was retrieving its RSA key.
Then by charting the timing of the memory access they were able to deduce the
key's actual numeric sequence. ...read the summaryOCZ does that 3rd generation SSD firmware cloud thing (but
gives it a better name)

Editor:- October 16, 2015 - It's no longer
just the newcomers to the enterprise SSD market who are doing that 3rd
generation / co-operative (whatever you want to call it) SSD controller
firmware and host stack collaboration thing.

It's available in the
Saber 1000 (2.5"
cloud oriented, read mostly SSDs). And they've got a better name for it too - "Host
Managed SSD Technology".

"Our new Saber HMS SSD, together
with a software library and API, enable for the first time (in OCZ's product
line) software orchestration of internal housekeeping tasks across large pools
of SSDs, thus overcoming performance barriers that were simply not possible to
address without this technology" said Oded Ilan, GM of OCZ's R&D
Team in Israel.

The EP2 series
delivers R/W IOPS up to 250K /25K respectively and low latencies of 35/35 (µs).
It also has power loss protection, scalability, end-to-end data protection,
low power consumption, high endurance, sustained performance, and customized
firmware.

Editor's comments:- in an earlier
press
release (in June
2015) about supplying a related product line to an unnamed customer
described as "one of the largest cloud service providers" Jeffrey Chang,
Lite-On's Technical Product Manager said "The
M.2 is perfect for where we
believe the future of enterprise
SSD cloud storage is going." SuperCloud rebuilds RAID 20x faster with CoreRise PCIe SSD

Editor:-
July 3, 2015 - CoreRise
today noted some
record breaking performance results from one of its customers -
SuperCloud (a well known Chinese
cloud server manufacture) based on a configuration with
CoreRise's PCIe
SSDs in a 4U server with 2x 56Gbs
InfiniBand ports.

Among other things SuperCloud said its lab results showed that
RAID rebuilding was 20x
faster than without the SSD - using a RAID5 configuration of 6D+1P. While RAID
throughput was 10 to 14GB/s and 1 to 1.5 million 4KB
IOPS.bath tub curve is not the most useful way of thinking about
PCIe SSD failures

Read disturbance errors - seem to very well managed in the enterprise SSDs
studied.

The authors said they "did not observe a statistically
significant difference in the failure rate between SSDs that have read the
most amount of data versus those that have read the least amount of data."

Higher operational temperatures mostly led to increased failure rates,
but the effect was more pronounced for SSDs which didn't use aggressive data
throttling techniques - which could prevent runaway temperatures due to
throttling back their write performance.

More data written by the hosts to the SSDs over time - mostly resulted in
more failures - but the authors noted that in some of the platforms studied -
more data written resulted in lower failure rates.

This was
attributed to the fact some SSD software implementations work better at
reducing write amplification when they are exposed to more workload patterns.

Unlike the classic bathtub curve failure model which applies to hard drives
- SSDs can be characterized as having early an warning phase - which comes
before an early failure weed out phase of the worst drives in the population
and which precedes the onset of predicted endurance based wearout.

In
this aspect - a small percentage of rogue SSDs account for a disproportionately
high percentage of the total data errors in the population.

The report
contains plenty of raw data and graphs which can be a valuable resource for
SSD designers and software writers to help them understand how they can tailor
their efforts towards achieving more reliable operation. ...read
the article (pdf)See also:-SSD ReliabilityCaringo gets patent for adaptive power conservation in SDS pools

Editor:-
May 19, 2015 -
Caringo today
announced
it has obtained a US patent for adaptive power conservation in storage
clusters. The patented technology underpins its Darkive storage management
service which (since its
introduction
in 2010) actively manages the electrical power load of its server based
storage pools according to anticipated needs.

"The access patterns
and retention requirements for enterprise data have changed considerably over
the last few years to a store-everything, always accessible approach and storage
must adapt," said Adrian
J Herrera, Caringo VP of Marketing. "We developed Darkive to help
organizations of any size extract every bit and watt of value while keeping
their data searchable, accessible, and protected."

Editor:-
March 12, 2015 -
QingCloud mentioned high capacity and
low cost among the reasons for selecting Seagate'sXP6209
(pdf) (PCIe SSD)
as components to build the low latency SSD infrastructure of its cloud
services for the China market - in a
press
release today.

It reveals useful
insights into the architectural thinking and value judgments of Coho's
technology - and is not simply another retelling of the Facebook infrastructure
story.

When you
read
it you may get different things out of it - because it's rich in raw
enterprise ideas related to
architecture,
software, and
dark matter users.
All of which makes it hard to pick out any single quote. But here are 2.

Andy Warfield
says - "In the past, enterprise hardware has had a pretty hands-off
relationship with the vendor that sells it and the development team that builds
it once it's been sold. The result is that systems evolve slowly, and must be
built for the general case, with little understanding of the actual workloads
that run on them."

Andy
Warfield says - "Efficiency is important. As a rough approximation, a
server in your datacenter costs as much to power and cool over 3 years as it
does to buy up front. It is important to get every ounce of utility that you
can out of it while it is in production."

"It was developed for the Department of Justice, and is now in
use, by GreenTec-USA, Inc. in conjunction with Seagate. Can we send you some
information? Would love to hear from you!" - Bob Waligunda,
VP of Sales at GreenTec-USA.

Editor's
comments:- I haven't spoken to Bob yet - because of the time difference. But
here's some info I got from GreenTec's web site:-

GreenTec
WORM whitepaper (pdf) - "Organizations today have demanding needs to
ensure that their sensitive data is protected. Considerable damage could be done
if critical or sensitive files are deleted or altered either accidentally or
intentionally"

The interesting thing for me is it shows that
innovation in the hard
drive market hasn't stopped completely. And GreenTec's 3TB (for now) WORM
drives are also available as arrays in micro cloud blocks.

I had almost
forgotten about my 9 year old WORM HDD (market needs this) article. I'll update
it later with this note.

Linking this back to SSDs - there have been
several companies in recent quarters who have announced physical write-disable
switches into embedded SSDs - including:-

Editor's comments:- you may judge for
yourself the lofty scale of Coho's
ambitions by this market
soothsayer quote which they integrated in the launch press release - "By
2017, Web-scale IT will be an architectural approach found operating in 50%
of Global 2,000 enterprises."

Editor:-
February 11, 2014 - Atlantis
Computing today
announced
that the new "In-Memory Storage Technology" release of its storage
virtualization software - called
Atlantis ILIO USX -
can significantly increase enterprise utilization by enabling users to deploy
up to 5x more VMs on their existing storage.

"We estimate that our
partners have delivered an astonishing $300 million in data efficiency savings
to their customers" said Tom Cook, CEO of Permabit
who anticipates license shipments to double in the next 6 months.

Editor's comments:- cloud companies - like
the stars in the sky - are nearly numberless - however if you want to see a
partial list of who they are - SolidFire's
news page is cluttered with the names of cloud companies - and reads
almost like a set of audited customer accounts than a technology news
forum - which can be off-putting - if like me - you're looking for
SSD content -
rather than SSD
investment fodder.

But although I couldn't find any mention of this
particular story on my brief visit to their website this time around - I was
reminded about an interesting observation which SolidFire had
written
about earlier (in February 2013) regarding the performance and QoS
impacts that "Noisy Neighbors" can create in a shared storage
infrastructure.

Their leading theme is cloud
service providers - but this issue is also critical to almost any realistic
deployments in an enterprise context - and is the implicit reason that many
architects have preferred to isolate critical apps servers in the past - even
within their own datacenters - rather than risk mixing them all up in pools.

In
a cartoon (they call it an "infographic") -
Noisy Neighbors in the Cloud (pdf) -
SolidFire captures the essence of this performance randomizing problem - whose
solution (you guessed it) is to use more (of their) SSDs.

September 28, 2012 - "Consumer
products are moving more and more towards that touch of artificial intelligence
and in particular speaking to your devices and having your voice sent off to the
cloud, recognised and analysed on good computers there and transmitted back"
- said Steve Wozniak
Chief Scientist at
Fusion-io in the
interview / article -
Data
deluge - the need for speed Amazon offers explicit SSD performance in the cloud

In
3 to 5 years time all enterprise storage infastucture will be solid state -
but due to economic necessities it will still be segmented into different types
by speed and function - as I described in my
SSD silos article -
even when it's all solid state.

I predict that when that happens -
AWS's marketers may choose to describe its lowest speed storage as "HDD
like" - even when it's SSD - in order to convey to customers what it's
about. It takes a long time for people to let go of old ideas. Remember
Virtual Tape Libraries?

Spellerbyte's amazing
magic carpet ride.

.

..

"What scares me is
when companies fall into the trap of trying to architect a single application to
work across multiple different cloud providers. I understand why engineers are
attracted to this.... Unfortunately, this effort eats into the productivity
gains that compelled the organization to the cloud in the first place."

But the blog quickly
repositions to a market analysis of enterprise architecture generations and
customer
segmentation preferences (both of which are often poorly understood in the
industry by senior managers in SSD companies).

Among other things
Steve says...

"Pure Storage's CEO, Scott Dietzen isn't the only
one at the storage manufacturer who doesn't grasp the magnitude of the
disruption Nutanix has brought to the datacenter." ...read
the article

related reading:-

the SSD heresies
- "Nowhere else in computer architecture will you get so many industry
experts disagreeing on such fundamental questions."

At the time of writing this
blog in 2012 I was thinking of the web scale companies, the cloud
infrastructuralists, and the real time analytics jocks who would change retail,
advertising, intelligence and all kinds of data upcycling leveraged activities
which previously had been technically impossible to monetize because data
processing was too slow and the reach of memory-like latencies were too small.

The online backup market
flared most brightly at the height of the dotcom boom crazy days in the late
1990s. That convinced me to create a dedicated page for this subject. You can
see an archived copy of the online backup page circa 2000 -
here.
Back then - I called it "Edrives & web based storage" - because "online
backup" hadn't yet become a standard term back then.

I was
unconvinced about the business models for many of these companies - which mostly
relied on unsustainable web advertising. I'd been making my living from the
sustainable kind (of advertising) - and knew the difference.

Sure
enough - this segment of the storage market got itself a bad reputation for
vendor churn and undependability in the long term.

You can get a
flavor of how the online backup industry changed (and our web site too) in the
years which followed, by clicking these archived links:-